This is the 2023-24 edition — an archived read. Read the 2026-27 report →
Scott Mayfield
New York Islanders Defense
Twenty-one minutes a night, eighty-three penalty minutes, and the 17th percentile of zone starts.
| Season | Team | GP | G | A | PTS | +/- | PIM | PP | SH | GW | S | S% | TOI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-14 | NYI | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | -3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0.0 | 17:22 |
| 2015-16 | NYI | 6 | 1 | 0 | 1 | -4 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 25.0 | 17:07 |
| 2016-17 | NYI | 25 | 2 | 7 | 9 | -1 | 35 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 39 | 5.1 | 14:08 |
| 2017-18 | NYI | 47 | 2 | 10 | 12 | -6 | 45 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 58 | 3.5 | 17:51 |
| 2018-19 | NYI | 79 | 4 | 15 | 19 | +18 | 68 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 104 | 3.9 | 18:44 |
| 2019-20 | NYI | 67 | 5 | 8 | 13 | +8 | 53 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 98 | 5.1 | 19:57 |
| 2020-21 | NYI | 56 | 2 | 13 | 15 | +2 | 38 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 79 | 2.5 | 19:29 |
| 2021-22 | NYI | 61 | 3 | 15 | 18 | -5 | 55 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 80 | 3.8 | 19:46 |
| 2022-23 | NYI | 82 | 6 | 18 | 24 | +8 | 83 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 119 | 5.0 | 21:02 |
| 2023-24 so far | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Career | — | 428 | 25 | 86 | 111 | +17 | 395 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 588 | 4.3 | 19:12 |
This Season So Far
The 2023-24 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.
Last Season
6 goals and 18 assists in 82 games — 24 points — at 21:02 a night. Plus-8, 119 shots, 83 penalty minutes, the most on the club.
1,462 five-on-five minutes, second only to Pulock.
49.8 per cent of the expected goals, the 50th percentile, with his ice at 51-50 against an expectation of 58.87-59.22 — eight goals short of the chances at the attacking end and nine better at the defensive.
He started 41.4 per cent of his shifts in the attacking zone, the 17th percentile: 316 attacking draws against 447. Three of this club’s six defencemen sat at or below the 18th percentile, and he is one of them.
Nine seasons, 428 games, 111 points, all of them here.
The Finesse Game
119 shots at a median of 54 feet, 80 per cent of them from beyond forty, and six goals.
Beyond forty: 88 shots on goal and 3 goals, 3.41 per cent, a shade above the positional rate of 3.17. Inside twenty: thirteen shots and three goals.
There is nothing to build on. 101 wrist shots and 48 slap out of 173 tracked attempts, and a measured 92.0 mph at the 59th percentile that says he does not shoot hard for a 6-4 defenceman.
86 career assists against 25 goals. The passing is functional, the first option is the boards, and eighteen assists from twenty-one minutes a night is the honest ceiling.
The Physical Game
6-4 and 215, with 83 penalty minutes and 395 in his career.
Top speed 22.2 mph, the 44th percentile; 0.3 bursts a game, the 15th; 2.67 miles a game, the 59th.
Slow off the mark and merely average at top speed, in twenty-one minutes of defensive-zone hockey — which is why the penalty minutes are what they are. When the gap closes late, the stick comes out.
He is a punishing defenceman who finishes every check available to him and clears the front of his own net by force. On a pairing that starts in its own end four hundred and forty-seven times, that is the point of him.
The fouls are the cost. Eighty-three penalty minutes on a club whose penalty kill finished 24th in the league is not a rounding error.
The Intangibles
Thirty-fourth overall in 2011, four seasons of fighting for a roster spot, and five as a twenty-minute defenceman since.
428 games without ever having played for anybody else, on a club that has kept the same six defencemen together longer than almost any team in the league.
He is thirty-one, and the skating is where the file will fail first. A defenceman who defends by arriving late and finishing hard has a shorter runway than one who defends by getting there early.
What kind of player
The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.
- measuredcomputed here from the season's own data
- a strengthread out of the prose, and claimed
- he lacks itraised, and he does not have it
Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.
- durable· was available
82 of 82 games
Season to season, this measure repeats weakly (0.32) · 53% keep it
“He is a punishing defenceman who finishes every check available to him and clears the front of his own net by force.”
“When the gap closes late, the stick comes out.”
“On a pairing that starts in its own end four hundred and forty-seven times, that is the point of him.”
The numbers underneath
On the ice
Five-on-five, 2022-23 · 1,462 minutes
- Expected goals
- 49.8%
- 50th pct
- Shot attempts
- 49%
- 45th pct
share of the chances while he was out there
share of the attempts while he was out there
Goals while he was on the ice: 51 for, 50 against. Expected: 58.9 and 59.2.
The eye and the numbers
HindsightThe two rank him within 7 points of one another. It was written for a back edition, with the seasons that followed already known. Neither the agreement nor the gap says anything about the eye, and this report is excluded from the club-level comparison for the same reason.
Both bars are percentiles among the 638 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 64 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.
Tracked
NHL Edge, 2022-23 · 82 games
- Top speed
- 22.2 mph
- 73rd pct
- Bursts over 20 mph
- 0.34 a game
- Distance
- 2.67 miles a game
- Hardest shot
- 92.0 mph
- 52nd pct
fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 21.5
how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes
skated, all strengths
one shot; the league's average best is 90.0
A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.
Usual linemates
2022-23 · 1462 minutes at five-on-five
- Adam Pelech20%
Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.
Why the numbers land there
Five-on-five, 2022-23
- The club
- NYI took 49.7% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.8% — 0.1 above the club he did it on.
- The role
- First pair, 1,462 minutes at five-on-five — 96th percentile in ice time.
With and without
| Teammate | Together | Him apart | Mate apart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alexander Romanov | 45.0% | 52.9% | 47.0% |
| Brock Nelson | 51.2% | 49.3% | 49.4% |
| Anders Lee | 52.5% | 48.8% | 54.7% |
45.0% together, 52.9% for him apart and 47.0% for Romanov apart. He was better away from Romanov, who was no worse away from him — the pairing cost him more than it cost Romanov.
Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.
Where he shoots from
goal on goal missed
168 unblocked shots in 2022-23, 6 of them goals. His median goal came from 47 feet. 10% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 80% from beyond forty.